Archive | PermalinkSWAG Request: Rhen Sannin

Shane's about to start a Star Wars RPG campaign and requested his major NPC Rhen Sannin, the freighter captain from the Star Wars Artists' Guild.

After giving some time for any other guild members to pick it up, I decided to claim the request earlier today... so I got to practice with the tablet and Painter Classic again, which is always good.

After some hours, here's Captain Rhen Sannin all made up and prettied, complete with blue milk on the side, cyborged limb and a datapad.

Click here for its SWAG entry page.

Hope this artwork gets some milage in your campaign, buddy.

Keywords: artwork,friends,star_wars,swag

Archive | PermalinkPacked Lunch is Packed

After only bring in sandwiches for snacks at kindergarten, Irfan brought an awesome looking packed lunch in his schoolbag which consisted of awesome meehoon goreng that Ain fried earlier in the morning

He finished it off at lunch.

I love the little fork and spoon set attached!

Keywords: food,irfan,kindergarten

Archive | PermalinkFighting Evil So You Wont Have To

The Middleman is the funniest show on TV right now... if you're a geek like me.

But I'll get to that in a minute.

Created by former scribe of Jake 2.0 and Lost, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, The Middleman reveals to us that there is one Middleman in existence in the world from a still-indisclosed point in time in the past. His job is to take care of extraordinary and highly bizzare problems, which usually involves incidents related to aliens, demons, mad scientists and mixes or variations thereof. The Middleman is also responsible for training an apprentice Middleman to take over one day because of the lethal occupational hazards.

And they work for a secret agency so secret and so efficient (their equipment gets replenished and upgraded almost immediately from unknown sources) and nameless that the Middleman himself has to give it his own acronym OTS2K, which stands for Organisation Too Secret To Know.

Keywords: funny,tv

Archive | PermalinkOn The Topic Of Names

Because of Wil Wheaton's post at his blog who wished that his name could be turned into a cool analog like Cherie Priest, I decided to check out anagrams of our own names on Wordsmith.com.

So as not to get too short a word in the anagram like "a" or "an" and have too many results returned, I set the maximum number of words to be 2 and the minimum number of letter in each word to be 3.

For my own name I entered "Khairul Hisham" because I get zero results from my full name and I entered Ain's full name without the " binti".

Keywords: funny,the_internets,wheaton

Archive | PermalinkThey're Really Just Form Five Schoolkids

For a single glorious moment in time, the song Diamond Crevasse, as sung by May Nakabayashi the singing voice of Sheryl Nome in Macross Frontier, became the most heartbreaking song in the whole universe. Thrice I've seen the ending of episode 20 and thrice I teared up... though it might just be the damn conjunctivitis.

There's so many bait-and-switches in this story, you just can't predict who lives and who dies. You kind of know someone will buy it, and you sort of figure out which ones would, but you think, "No, maybe it's another bait-and-switch."

Then wham! When it happens, it happens right in the middle of that song which had stood for something else when you heard it in previous episodes, and was sung in this episode for a totally different reason. But the melody and the timing of it just interposes with each other perfectly, and despair and sadness hits you squarely in the guts.

One of the best shows on TV right now, I'm thinking.

Keywords: anime,music,tv

Archive | PermalinkAllie's 1 Month Birthday

It has been an exciting time for us: Allie has been a fun and also challenging addition to the family. Everything we do is according to her schedule, so it has been hard to keep the blog updated with what we have been up to. I'll try to do some more detailed updates of what's been happening since Allie's 1-week birthday blog. But for now, a quick pictorial of Alya who turned 1 month old last Friday (August 22).

(As always, hover over the pictures for captions)

Keywords: alya,birthday

Archive | PermalinkA Letter To The United States

I don't usually write long letters nowadays thanks to the internet, which allows you to communicate immediately to family and friends with concise information almost everyday, if need be. This has the result of never requiring to long letters to tell other people the various things that happen to you in a single long document.

Recently I've had to write a pretty long email to Irfan and Alya's Atok and Opah who are still in Ohio playing with little Alya.

I should try to summarize the email here, however I will just let you read an excerpt from it.

Keywords: accident,family_outings,kuala_lumpur

Archive | PermalinkMore Pictures Painted With A Tablet

This time it's not me.

Irfan's learned to not only draw and colour pictures digitally, but he's also learnt to use layers. I'd create a file for him with two layers, and he'll do the rest. He select the top layer to draw his line art. Then, he'll select the bottom layer and choose the colours he want to paint.

Let's go through one artwork at a time:

Take for example this piece here, some kind of a plant based monster complete with petals and legs. Bewildered by the roof like structure atop the monster's face, he finally revealed to me today that the creature was based on Constance's final incarnation in Monster House. The antennae apparently receives television signals.

Keywords: artwork,irfan

Archive | PermalinkThe Parents of One Irfan Shafiq, Part Two

I took some family photos which I thought I'd put up here.

Here's Abah Irfan's eye.

And then, here's Irfan's Ummi's eye.

Keywords: medical

Archive | PermalinkThe Parents of One Irfan Shafiq

Irfan drew some stuff which I thought I'd put up here.

Here's Irfan's Abah.

And then, here's Irfan's Ummi.

Keywords: artwork,irfan

Archive | PermalinkBurtt At His Best - A WALL-E Review

WALL-E, directed by Finding Nemo's Andrew Stanton, is indeed according to Ben Burtt, "R2-D2 the movie ". And as any Star Wars fan knows, Burtt has been the Academy Award sound designer for all the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, as well as a writer for the Droids cartoon TV movie The Great Heep which featured R2-D2 and C-3P0. So, there is no one more skilled than him in crafting mechanical sounds that elicit emotions in viewers.

WALL-E is the acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth-class, a trash management robot designed to clear the immense volume of garbage from an uninhibitable Earth, and left behind when all Humans have evacuated into ships in space. We also see two WALL-As - Axiom-class robots later in the movie.

However, it's been seven hundred years since he first started his job and all the other WALL-Es are damaged beyond repair and dead. Over the course of seven centuries, the remaining WALL-E is still doing his job, has developed sapience, emotion, and a hobby of collecting interesting trinket. Also, he has a fondness for his pet roach who follows him around, keeping him company on his job rounds.

Light spoilers will follow. But it's not as if you can't figure out what's going to happen just looking at the trailers.

Keywords: movie,movie_review

Archive | PermalinkChinese New Year, Sitiawan... Some Time Ago

The Nineties kind of rushed by me, as if I can't wait to be somewhere but it looks more, as time goes by, like I will not be reaching there anytime soon. So a lot of the details of the time here were quite blurry. Take the following photos of the ACS gang balik kampung and gathering for Chinese New Year. What year did this occur? I can't rightly remember.

All I remember is that I picked up the gentlebeings in the first photo below, had some refreshment at Woon Seong's house before we all went to Teik Sing's house where the big daytime gathering was planned.

Keywords: acs_sitiawan,balik_kampung,friends

Archive | PermalinkArakyd Diamondback Droid Stats

It was during the Enteague Sector campaign for the Star Wars Roleplaying Game which I GMed perhaps fifteen years ago. A new team of the Strikeforce Enteague, consisting of younger members, had to investigate the Malc Toldreyn Library on the planet Neeuderni to solve the campaign mystery arc of why an Imperial Admiral (no names here, cause in retrospect the NPC naming convention I used at around this time sucked) wanted Ham Slacker the tongue-tied engineer dead.

Naturally, the Imperials attacked during the investigation. Radio communications on and around the planet was jammed. It turned out that the Imps had deployed a Diamondback droid which is designed to jam planetary and interplanetary communications. The group borrowed the local defence forces' CloakShape fighters to attack the droid, which had its own defences in the form of anti-fighter cannons.

I 've rewritten down the D6 stats slightly modified from my original pencil notes and uploaded them to Phil Hatfield's site D6 Universe for posterity's sake.

I've reproduced it here for my own reference.

Keywords: artwork,rpg,star_wars

Archive | PermalinkIllustration Friday: Sail

The topic for Illustration Friday for this week is "sail", as can be seen above. Now what would be weird is if the camera pans down and we see the mast planted firmly on a field instead of a boat. A higher resolution version of the image can be found here.

Keywords: artwork,illustration_friday

Archive | PermalinkOnly You Can Save The World

I was tagged with a meme by Lil at iFantabulous some time ago and I finally got around to writing (and illustrating) it today.

What I have to do is to fill out the form with 5 lines below to reveal my secret superhero identity and come up with an image of my alter ego.

So, a superhero, eh? Here goes nothing.

Keywords: artwork,fiction,friends,meme

Archive | PermalinkA Conjunctivitis Onslaught

Well, it's not really an onslaught, but Irfan's right eye seem to be suffering from viral conjunctivitis.

He's home from school today with a note from the doctor, and seem to enjoy eyedrops being applied onto his cornea. I think Ain's going to pop an artery when she sees the mess in the living room when she gets home from work in an hour.

Keywords: around_the_house,irfan,medical

Archive | PermalinkIrfan Moves Pieces Around The Board

Irfan's Cik Emma got a free chessboard after a trip to the PC Fair at KLCC. So I spent a short while teaching Irfan to play chess, showing him how the various pieces move across the board. I checkmated him quite easily in the first game. However, if I remember my last games (which might have been with Sila, about a quarter of a million years ago), I get wiped off the board pretty easily because I usually carry out suicide runs which in the end leaves me with nothing but one or two pawns guarding my king.

Keywords: around_the_house,irfan

Archive | PermalinkIllustration Friday: Poof!

Or more specifically, what happens after the poof!

For Illustration Friday.

Keywords: artwork,illustration_friday